Friday March 22, 2002

Backgrounds

Just done a little work on Episode 5. Not much as I have a hectic 2 weeks ahead of me and need to get focus, but I've had some more thoughts about it.

Animating one figure in its own space is (relatively) easy. But as soon as you add backgrounds it gets much more complicated. For example:

1. dark background (it's night-time)
2. a building
3. Chickenman (walking in front of the building)
4. another character (possibly walking in front of Chickenman)

• Episode 3: Chickenman getting out of the car
• Episode 4: Dark background
• Announcement: Chickenman standing in front of the stage curtain

you can see that I have dealt with at least 2 sets of objects trying to occupy the same space on the canvass...

On alt.ascii-art, someone has (half-jokingly) suggested that JavE should have 'layers', the way that professional art editors like Photoshop do. Layers allow you to think of your final image as being composed of several layers of transparencies (background, near background, foreground 1, foreground 2 etc.). This allows you to edit and position each of them individually, preview what they look like merged (as if you'd placed the transparencies on top of each other) and then finally creating a text file. I think that Markus liked the idea, but it was too complicated to implement with the current way JavE works. And really, for ascii artwork, I think that you can live without it, but for animation it's difficult...

There are other possibilities that wouldn't require full layers functionality (merging files, scripting copy-and-pastes etc.) but in the mean time, I had a thought about animating against a dark background:

When animating Episode 4, I started with the background, then moved the characters against that. Every time they moved, I'd have to redraw the shadow (888888) around them. But... I think that it might be easier to start by just drawing the frames with the foreground, and then later filling the dark background. Obviously that would be harder with a patterned background (like in the Announcement) or impossible with a non-repeating background (like the car in Ep3).

+----------------------------+----------------------------+
|                            |8888888888888888888888888888|
|               888888888    |8888888888888888888888888888|
|              P         Y   |88888888888888P         Y888|
|             8 Let's try 8  |88888888888888 Let's try 888|
|     oo       b to find  Y  |88888oo8888888b to find  Y88|
|              8 the door! 8 |888888888888888 the door! 88|
|          @@  8.        ,d  |8888888888@@888.        ,d88|
|                888888888   |8888888888888888888888888888|
+----------------------------+----------------------------+

The asciimation collaboration